Trailer Watch: Bill Murray as FDR in Hyde Park on Hudson

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

You can tell it’s getting closer to Oscarbait season when the trailers start popping up in mid- to late-summer.

This one, for Hyde Park on Hudson features Bill Murray doing a charming (but not slavish) take on FDR. Knowing the Academy’s love for impressions over proper acting, this mix of both will likely draw some attention. Surely Focus Features is counting on that, with its December 7th release date — just a week before The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. (Fortunately, it has little competition, with only Playing the Field opening that weekend, a comedy starring Gerard Butler as a former athlete turned kids’ soccer coach who finds it a little too easy to score with his players’ moms.)

Samuel West stars as King George VI, though he looks a bit more like Colin Firth (who won the Best Actor Oscar for playing George VI in 2010’s The King’s Speech) than the real King, if you ask me. That can’t be a coincidence. Anyway, check out the trailer below:

In June 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Murray) and his wife Eleanor (Williams) host the King and Queen of England (West and Colman) for a weekend at the Roosevelt home at Hyde Park on Hudson, in upstate New York–the first-ever visit of a reigning English monarch to America. With Britain facing imminent war with Germany, the Royals are desperately looking to FDR for support. But international affairs must be juggled with the complexities of FDR’s domestic establishment, as wife, mother, and mistresses all conspire to make the royal weekend an unforgettable one. Seen through the eyes of Daisy (Linney), Franklin’s neighbor and intimate, the weekend will produce not only a special relationship between two great nations, but, for Daisy–and through her, for us all–a deeper understanding of the mysteries of love and friendship.